The magisteel stairs unfolded themselves down in front of me with a groan like a rusty giant stretching awake, each step black like deepest darkest space.

  I looked at them and then tilted my head up and around, feeling off, my mind utterly derailed, skipping sideways.

  I was certain that I had just spoken to an Archangel, but this memory was elusive and already fleeing from my head like a half-forgotten daydream.

  I decided not to cling to it, focusing on the present. My eyes determined that I was in a vast, fanciful Omnithornian train station. Gold letters embossed on a crystalline red centipede-cart defined the train in front of me as “Skyfall Express”.

  The train was huge, bigger than Possy.

  Possy. Who was Possy? I had no idea. Whatever. It would come to me eventually. Probably.

  My memory wobbled as I tried to understand how I ended up in this particular location and particular time.

  Since when was there a train to Skyfall? Wasn't Skyfall in Leviathan’s Cradle? Another disconcerting memory that didn't match my current reality.

  The Skyfall train looked quite imposing. Crystalline red, segmented, featuring gargantuan, crystalline feet. It dwarfed my person.

  The train was definitely the highest tier of Omnid magitek, a monstrous arcane construct built to a scale that made my small self feel rather inadequate.

  The tall Omnids boarding it felt right at home. I, however, felt like a particularly unwelcome speck of human dust.

  “Move it, nullie-brain!” A sharp voice sliced through my transient thoughts.

  “What?” I asked.

  A boot connected with the small of my back, not gently. “Unless you’re planning on missing the only transport to Skyfall and spending the rest of your pathetic existence scrubbing Scab Row toilets, move!”

  For a second my brain froze again.

  “Stop hanging up, you effing knob!” A clawed hand smacked my head as I spun around.

  “Emerald?” I asked, recognizing the red dragon girl.

  “Ember!” She barked. “Did you lose whatever brain cells you had in there?”

  A magisteel centipede trunk stood behind Ember, metal feet tapping as it waited for us to board.

  A memory that didn't belong suddenly became apparent.

  This was my older sister, Ember Stratos, my personal warden. She was a year ahead of me, bonded to the Pyroclast house of Skyfall–the ambitious, aggressive leaders, naturally. Ember made it her personal mission to remind me, hourly, of my utter lack of worth and incompetence.

  According to the inexplicable memories, I was a stain on the Stratos family’s marginally respectable lineage, a nullie, a waste of perfectly good oxygen in Omnithornia.

  “Get moving, imbecile!” Ember barked. “At this rate, you'll be lucky to end up as a gardener at Skyfall, probably weeding the enchanted petunias with your bare hands until you wither away!”

  “I’m going, I’m going,” I muttered, scrambling up the magisteel stairs, a worn rucksack with my worldly possessions bumping against my spine. The crystalline segments of the train pulsed with a faint, internal light, like it was alive, breathing. It was beautiful, in a disconcerting way.

  Ember, clad in her crimson and gold robe, practically shoved me into a doorway that opened with a hiss of displaced air.

  “This is you,” she declared as I looked at the red leather, magisteel plate and green flowery moss wall of the hexamesh-reinforced compartment. “Don’t wander off. Don’t embarrass me. And for the love of everything holy, don’t even think about talking to any real Mystagogues.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” I answered, my brain boiling from within.

  She snorted, her ruby-red hair catching the light. “Good. I’ma go see my besties. Pyroclast business, nulls. Way above your pay grade.” She smirked, that cruel, knowing smirk that promised future torment. “Try not to spontaneously combust from your sheer magical inadequacy before we get to Skyfall.”

  And with that, she was gone, her footsteps echoing down the corridor, presumably towards the social epicenter of this oversized train-centipede.

  The compartment door hissed shut behind her, sealing me in with the deep dragonheart beat-hum of the train.

  I remained seated contemplating the wrongness of reality I had found myself in.

  For a while, I was alone with my thoughts. I glanced out the window. An aetheric density determination clocktower displayed the number 452.32 mpm.

  I closed my eyes, reorganizing my wobbling head.

  When did Emerald become Ember? When did she become my sister? Was she always my sister and I had simply lost track of her last time around or something? Did Archangel Zadkiel somehow break reality when she departed? It seemed like the most rational answer.

  Freeing All-Knowing Archangels seemed to have terrible, unexpected consequences.

  Was I alone in conversing with the Archangel? I was certain that there was someone there with me, but as to whom, I could not recall. The gray wave the eldritch entity had pounded me with had done something to me, wobbled my sense of self almost entirely out of alignment.

  I promised myself not to free any more bound gods. Dealing with somewhat mangled reality and a very mangled sense of self was annoying. Then again, the impact of the Wormwood Star had mangled reality to begin with. Was the Earth twice as mangled now? Ten times as mangled?

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  How many times had I mangled up everything, forgotten, lost the people I cared about? It was difficult to tell, my mind still felt soupy like it was put together slightly wrong, missing far too many important bits.

  I decided to roll with it, waiting to remember more, waiting to react to events as they unfolded.

  The crystalline centipede train shuddered, then began to move, a low rumble vibrating through the floor.

  Skyfall Academy, here I come. Let the fun begin… again?

  I was fairly certain that I had been to Skyfall before, but there were no trains involved. I liked trains, even if they were giant crystalline centipedes.

  I slumped onto one of the red leather seats, my worn rucksack thudding onto the floor beside me. The red leather was surprisingly soft. Everything here was built with a kind of unsettling permanence, a sense of power that hummed beneath the surface. I felt misplaced, like a glitch in the system, a smear on the pristine surface of Omnithornian perfection.

  My head throbbed, far too many memories of another place and time swirling in it. Fragments of Otherness, coalesced in and out, washing against the shore of my being like gray waves.

  I suddenly recalled that the Stratos family Psychopomp classified me as ‘dimensionally skewered’. Basically, incurably insane. An incurably insane, barely magical nullborn born from the brief union of my dragon father and my human mother from North Acadia who died last spring.

  If I failed to achieve anything of value in Skyfall, the Stratos would probably disown me and bury me in a ditch somewhere.

  I closed my eyes focusing on realigning my mangled, four-fold soul. Champion-Understanding-Architect-Leader. Was this the right order? I was relatively sure that it was. Maybe not. Whatever. I was working on it. I gradually began to move the Architect down to the lowest layer.

  The compartment door hissed open again, so abruptly it almost made me jump.

  Was Ember back to annoy me? I looked up. This wasn't Ember.

  Standing in the doorway was… a silver girl with dark makeup and draconic features.

  Definitely female, despite the shapeless grey robes of an unassigned Skyfall student. Silver-blue feathers, impossibly radiant, fanned out from her head, catching the light of the train compartment and sparkling like moonlight on water.

  She had wings too. Silver wings shimmering with a rainbow of dancing colors at the edges.

  Ocean-blue eyes, startlingly bright against the grey robes, fixed on me. And then she froze. I froze too, the gears of my mind grinding to a halt.

  The girl in the doorway stopped breathing, all movement ceasing, like a bird suddenly spotting a predator.

  She stared. Stared right at me, with an intensity that made the air in the small compartment feel thick and charged.

  My breath hitched, distracting me from mentally pawing at the gargantuan shear-holes in my soul.

  Did I know her? Did she know me?

  Then, with a suddenness that made me flinch, she moved. Not away, but towards me. Long strides ate up the space between us, and before I could even register a thought, strong hands–surprisingly warm, despite the predatory look in those blue eyes–grabbed at me.

  “Erm,” I managed to croak out, but it was too late.

  She pulled me closer, her face inches from mine. And then, she did the most bizarre thing. She breathed in. Deeply. Like she was trying to inhale my very essence. I could feel her breath ghost across my face, a warm, faintly… avian-draconic scent.

  Like ozone, lavender and something wild, untamed. Something incredibly familiar clawing at the edges of my soul.

  Intensely sharp eyes narrowed, raking over me, assessing. She was looking me up and down, and I suddenly felt acutely aware of my shoddy, worn clothes, my lack of… everything, really. Her gaze lingered for a moment too long on my face, then dropped lower, taking in my… well, my male-ness.

  A flicker of something crossed her expression. Disappointment? Disgust? It was gone too quickly to decipher, but it felt… negative.

  “Hrm…” she said. “I know you from somewhere.” She reached out, a hand gripping my chin, tilting my face up to hers. “You’re mine,” she suddenly declared, the words dropping into the silence of the compartment with a chilling certainty. “Yeah. You’re definitely mine.”

  “What?” I asked, trying to connect the dots.

  “Mine,” She slumped onto the seat, wrapping a clawed, scaled hand around me, silver feathers bristling. “I own you.”

  “Say what?” I blinked at her.

  “You’re going to be my kobold,” she said. “I’m claiming you.”

  “I’m sorry and you are?” I asked.

  “Cinder,” was her brisk reply.

  “Cinder?” I repeated.

  “Yes.” She huffed, a puff of air that ruffled the silver feathers around her face. “Cinder Nova. And you’re my kobold.” She tightened her grip on my arm. “Don’t you know what a kobold is?”

  “Should I?" I asked, squinting at her. I knew what a Kobold was, but it was better to keep her talking to understand my current predicament better.

  “Of course you should,” she said, rolling her ocean-blue eyes. “Honestly, nullies are so ignorant.” She released my arm, finally, and leaned back against the plush red leather, stretching out her legs and displaying her dark leather boots. Even in the bulky robes, I could tell she was… substantial, a head taller than me.

  “Uh-huh,” I nodded.

  “A kobold is… well, it’s a servant,” she explained, as if talking to a particularly slow child. “A useful thing. Like a pet, but… more practical. You’re going to be mine. At Skyfall.”

  My brain stalled. “Wait. Hold on. I’m… what? Your servant? No. Absolutely not.” The sheer audacity of it was almost comical. Almost. Considering the claws and wings, and the way she’d just declared ownership like it was a casual observation about the weather, maybe not so comical.

  Bloody dragons, always claiming things.

  “Yes. My kobold,” she repeated, as if I hadn't just spoken. “You’ll live in my dorm room. Do my… work for me. Fetch things. Carry things. Maybe polish my scales, if you’re good.” She considered this last point, tapping a claw against her chin. “Yes. Scale polishing. Definitely.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said again, more firmly this time. “I am not going to be your ‘kobold’. I’m a student. Just like you. Well, attending the same school as you, anyway. And definitely not as your servant.”

  Cinder just stared at me, her head tilted slightly, like a bird of prey assessing a particularly uncooperative worm. “You’re a nullie.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “And you’re in my compartment.”

  “Did you happen to bite this compartment to claim it?" I asked, recalling how dragons claimed things for their hoard. “I don’t see your name on it.”

  "You some kind of a wise guy?" she squinted at me.

  "You can't claim this is your compartment," I grinned. "I was here first. And you certainly can't claim me as yours. There was no ritual, no anything!"

  “Semantics. And I said you’re mine.” She punctuated each word with a sharp tap of her claw on the seat beside her. “That means you’re mine. It’s very simple, nullie-brain.”

  “Simple for you, maybe,” I muttered. “But I don’t belong to anyone. I’m not property.” I even stuck out my hand, a pathetic gesture in retrospect. “Alexander Stratos-Kilborne.”

  She ignored my hand, her eyes narrowing again, the bright blue intensifying, becoming almost electric. “Alexander,” she repeated, tasting the name. “Hrmmmm. Still doesn’t change anything. You’re mine."

  "And if I object?"

  "Pffff. You think your ‘no’ means anything to me?”

  “It should,” I insisted, even though my heart was hammering against my ribs.

  “Should it?” She laughed, a short, sharp sound that was anything but amused. “Oh, nullie. You have so much to learn.” Her eyes flicked downwards, to my neck, lingering there for a beat too long. Then, with terrifying speed, she lunged.